Abstract:
In this essay, I will explore the liminal spaces of queer possibility in dreams, desires, and ambiguity for women outside of relations defined within patriarchal societies that require a female experience that exclusively serves men. Intimacy and sensuality between women surpasses the conventional perceptions of homosexuality that are defined in relation to homosexual men; queer women are not solely the female equivalent of male queerness. Patriarchal structures deny representation of the enriched and tender intimacy of female companionship: the compassion and affection between young girls, the gentle care in applying makeup, and the amity in time well spent. In her novel Gulf Dreams, Emma Pérez creates such an intimacy between two young women, and in the fragmented nature of dialogue, photographs, and dreams, she designs representations of intimacy between women that encompass an ambiguous boundary between sexual and sensual.
Keywords: lesbian, queer women, LGBT+, fragmentation, sensuality, desire, Gulf Dreams
“And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love. (Lorde, 1984, pg 58)”
For me, Audre Lorde exists at the center of any exploration of sensuality and the depth of joy, particularly in relation to queer women. Being that her prose is poetic, she is capable of capturing the deeply lyrical quality of companionship, yearning, and emotion. This rich sensual desire that women nourish with one another is particularly poignant in coming of age prose where women have yet to have ingrained in them the full scope of societal limitations and for whom this period is fixated on a playful discovery of desire and kinship. It is during this experience of aging, and while I lacked a firm grasp on how the world works and my particular place, that I pursued a new depth of intimacy within my friendships with other girls. The connection we fostered was neither platonic nor romantic but transformative in that it did not conform to the binary design that separates friendships from romantic relationships. We ran our hands through each other’s hair and caressed one another’s skin; we conversed and rested in the embrace of the others, intertwining our limbs. This intimacy was characterized by our youth and a carnal desire for the nurturing capacities of feminine tenderness and devotion that I view as separate from my existence as an individual who solely experiences attraction to women and does not experience sexual attraction to any gender. It is such narratives of gentle tenderness juxtaposed with ravenous and carnal desire that were not represented in literature for youth and scantily rendered in the broader genres of literature. While wildly inappropriate for youth, chiefly because of its representations of violence, Gulf Dreams by Emma Pérez immediately stood out to me in this genre because of its inquiry, exploration, and representation of the ambiguous desire between women and the potency of the unrealized state of such sensations. The ambiguity of such bonds has the radical capacity to destabilize binary modes of reality; it is through the fragmentation of the postulation that reality has truths in complete opposition, that space is conceived for truer connection.
Gulf Dreams follows a young Chicana as she comes of age in El Pueblo, a rural town in Texas, and experiences the depth of obsessive yearning for a character only ever referred to as “the young woman” as she grapples with her unrealized desire and the violence of growing into a body denied privilege for her ancestry, skin color, and attraction to women. (1996) The young woman is the younger sister of the narrator’s friend, and the two girls are brought together in this shared context of this preexisting intimacy. The two girls weave in and out of each other’s lives, interrupted by long absences, and complicated by the introduction of men into the scopes of their lives. The novel is characterized by intensity: extreme desire but also violence as the character rebels against internally and externally imposed limitations on their intimacy with others and the tumultuous nature of patriarchal society. Under such a perspective, a relationship between women denies men primacy and is therefore marked as illicit.
The companionship and intimacy between the narrator and the young woman in Gulf Dreams by Emma Pérez is an exposition of such a narrative, the air of which is sodden with desire, in which physical intimacy can only be realized in dreamscapes and dialogue;
“intimacies of the flesh achieved through words. That was our affair. Years later, I rediscovered my compulsion to consummate intimacy through dialogue — to make love with a tongue that spewed desire, that pleaded for more words, acid droplets on my skin. With her, I learned to make love to women without a touch. I craved intimate, erotic dialogue. (Pérez, 1996, pg. 41)”
This passage illustrates the spectrum of expressions of intimacy. The phrasing is deeply physical: ‘consummation’, ‘intimacies of flesh’, ‘tongue’ and ‘skin’, this choice is very intentional and highlights how such conversation is not only a replacement for physical intimacy, but valued in its own right. There is a transcending quality to this passage, not to declare that it aligns with religious representations of virgin skin, but that conversation allows the women a richer spiritual union.
There is a fragmented quality to the narration of Gulf Dreams; the scenes are temporarily out of order and scenes of the narrator’s childhood, her time with the young woman within the conscious world, and her time with the young woman in her dreams are woven together to form a representation of the asynchronous organization of memories. The narrator asks herself the question, ’how did my past form my present?’, and elucidates that personal history is non-linear and answers such a question is impossible without grasping the scattered quality of memory. One manner in which the author explores how the narrator’s desire is informed by her history is through the use of photographs. This is a questionable choice, as John Szarkowski posits in The Photographer’s Eye–“5 Things” , photographs are incapable of sufficiently capturing a narrative. This author contrasts the deeply intentional art of painting in which each stroke is deliberate and imbued with significance in contrast to the instantaneous and uncontrolled practice of photography; “[t]he decline of narrative painting in the past century has been ascribed in large part to the rise of photography, which “relieved” the painter of the necessity of storytelling. This is curious, since photography has never been successful at narrative. It has in fact seldom attempted it. (Szarkowski, 2003)" A photograph is merely a still of a scene and even strung together, the stunted movements of images highlight the gaps in detail as opposed to the content they display. That is to say that a photograph has a morbid stillness that can be likened to death, juxtaposed to the life in the fluidity and movement of brushstrokes in a painting; the phrase “brought to life” or “breathe life into” is often used when discussing paintings as it is the labor and love of the artist that creates the final piece. Pérez highlights this contrast in her novel;
“I have a photograph of her, sprawled on a pier. It’s late summer. She wears shorts and a white cotton sweatshirt with holes in the sleeves. Her legs are tanned golden and luxurious. She smiles into the camera. She smiles for a lover. I’m not sure why she gave me a photo which caught her elation for another lover. I scrutinize the photo sometimes and think about how long I have known her, she who smiles for other lovers. (Pérez, 1996, pg. 108)”
Here, the distance between the young woman and the narrator is highlighted in the distance between viewer and subject and the incongruity of the narrator and the named lover of the young woman mentioned. Reality is fragmented as the narrator and the young woman allow for a reality where the former is the photographer and lover and the latter smiles in adoration.
Such fragmentations endure in the narrator’s dreamscape. It is within the liminal dream-like spaces and the imagined that the narrator grants herself permission to act on her ravenous yearning for the young woman; even at a young age, she understands that these inclinations are taboo. Pérez writes,
“I dreamt of her fingers brushing my skin, lightly smoothing over breasts, neck, back, all that ached for her. A fifteen-year-old body ached from loneliness and desire, so unsure of the certainties her body felt. Nights like this would bring her to me. Never sleeping. Half-awake to ensure that it was she embracing me. In those dreams, we touched carefully. (Pérez, 1996, pg. 9)”
Her denied reality in the conscious realm becomes realized and liberated in the scope of her dreams. The author juxtaposes how the narrator is ‘unsure’ with ‘the certainties her body felt’, and how the intimacy was acted upon ‘lightly’ and through ‘brushes’ despite the aching nature of her desire and its capacity to inhibit sleep. Here there is the interrupted and fractured state of being pulled through scenes of intimacy, but also the interstitial realm of the not quite asleep but not awake.
Night is a deeply ambiguous landscape; obscured by our inability to see in the dark and haunted by the elusively mystical dreams. The term “dreams” not only describes unconscious experiences but also the desired; it is peculiar that despite the monstrous and destructive nature of nightmares, “dreams” as aspirations maintain an association with optimism, ambition, and positivity. Both translations are pertinent to Gulf Dreams in that the narrator’s dreams are burgeoning with her desire for the young woman, and the elusive reality of physical intimacy in the conscious realm mirrors the ephemeral nature of dreams and the night. Through her physical intimacies at night, the narrator navigates her desire in the fragmented reality of a multeity of desired intimacies. Dreams are inherently chaotic in nature; they are non-linear and disrupt the rules of possibility and improbability; a world that allows for human flight, the congregation of figures not only from vastly distinct periods of time but fictional universes, and repetitive scenes such as the haunting feeling of falling over the same edge over and over. Dreams are particularly subversive because they have the capacity to allow forward and backward movement through time but also allow the past into the future and vice versa, and then fill that space in the middle to create a new reality.
It is pertinent to develop an understanding of fragmentation for its capacity to conjure realities that subvert the dominant cultures; which is necessary in the case of the narrator who is Chicana, a woman, queer, and in a lower economic class. History as the dominant narrative is yet another field that was colonized, and its rigid and ordered nature forbids the inclusion of marginalized bodies. In another one of her novels, Decolonial Imaginaries, Pérez states that Chicana/o history exists in the “time lag” between the colonial and postcolonial. (Pérez, 1999, pg. 6) It is by fragmenting the temporal structure and separation of colonial and postcolonial, that space for Chicana/o exists in the form of non-linear storytelling that acknowledges the wealth of perspective and the value in non-traditional narratives in oral story-telling, poetry, photographs, and the voices of those who have not received, or been allowed, formal educations. Muñoz in Cruising Utopia expounds that:
“[t]he here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. (Muñoz, 2009)”
The queer imaginary that allows for a spectrum of feminine intimacies exists outside the “here and now” and in the transportation that Muñoz describes; it lies in the shattering of a reality that solely acknowledges one truth in the contemporary world to allow for the simultaneous existence of the present and the past. It is here that I invoke the conceptualization of “remembering” made by Bell Hooks: “The word remember (re-member) evokes the coming together of severed parts, fragments becoming a whole. (2003, pg. 394)” Here, the “whole” is not singular but formed by the fragments to represent the broad spectrum of realities.
Queer femininity gains its strength in the potent richness of diversity and in the depth of its sensuality. It is when such intimacies are limited by simplifying this vast multeity into a singular experience or label that the radical revolution and the sensuality therein is extinguished. Queer prose is when, “in a woman writer’s work, a sentence refuses to do what it is supposed to do, if there are strong images of women and if there is a refusal to be linear, the result is innately lesbian literature. (Esquibel, 1998 pg. 645)” The resistance in texts of queer womanhood diversion from expectations within the dominant culture allows for the imaginary of, not female primacy because that insinuates that males are devalued, but, the sensual and rich vibrancy of womanhood. Pérez’s writing emphasizes the depth of sensual female kinship, offering a narrative that finds a voice in the disruptive potential of fragmented storytelling; “In a corner of the kitchen our hands hold fingers, playing a game, threading in and out, across the table. (Pérez, 1996, pg. 38)”
References
Esquibel, C. R. (1998). Memories of girlhood: Chicana lesbian fictions. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 23(3), 645-682. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175305
Hooks, B. (2003). In Our Glory Photography and Black Life. In L. Wells (Ed.), The photography reader: History and theory (pp. 387-394). Routledge. https://archive.org/details/photographyreade0000unse/page/n9/mode/2up
Lorde, A. (2020). Uses of the Erotic. In Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (pp. 53-59). Penguin. https://rhinehartibenglish.weebly.com/uploads/2/2/1/0/22108252/sister_outsider_audrey_lorde_ib_pdf_packet.pdf
Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. NYU Press. https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2010/03/from-jose-esteban-munoz-cruising-utopia.html
Pérez, E. (1996). Gulf dreams. 3rd Woman Press. https://www.everand.com/read/335710470/Gulf-Dreams#
Pérez, E. (1999). The Decolonial imaginary: Writing chicanas into history. Indiana University Press. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2138593843/Z001788163?parentSessionId=GoFTVjpFmd9Dy6TZJcMTMcxyU6O1sKXJ9hQGvZ85jFg%3D&pq-origsite=summon&accountid=14244
Rich, A. (1998). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Feminisms, 320-324. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192892706.003.0054
Szarkowski, J., & Wells, L. (2003). The Photographer’s Eye–“5 Things”. In The photography reader. Psychology Press. https://photobyrne.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/reading-john-szarkowskis-intro-to-the-photographers-eye-5-things/